Dobby, an AI-powered home maintenance platform, today announced its seed capital raise of $1.7 million. The capital will strengthen the company's growth initiatives, and spotlight its proprietary, automated, AI-first experience to homeowners, service providers, and ancillary beneficiaries such as real estate agents.
Financing was led by Dundee VC with B5 Capital, the family office of Mark Bailey, founder/ partner at DFJ Growth; Jeremy Achin, co-founder/CEO at DataRobot; Maury Devine, board member at ConocoPhillips and early investor in Sweetgreen; and Andrew Macdonald, head of Uber Mobility as other major participants. This equity finance raise comes as Dobby scales to meet strong demand in the home maintenance sector, which, according to a Bank of America spending report, is seeing home maintenance consumer spending 60% above the Jan-2020 level.
"During my days at DataRobot, I saw an opportunity to build an AI-first company from the ground up in a large and unsexy industry," said Satadru Sangupta, Dobby's CEO and co-founder. "I chose home maintenance because this $400B industry has not had a tech makeover for more than a decade and suffers terribly low NPS across the board. Dobby's AI-first design enables us to become embedded in the homeownership journey, help homeowners increase the property value, and yes, make home maintenance fun."
An AI-first design has also helped Dobby increase operational efficiencies, lower costs, and flip the business model in the home maintenance industry. Existing maintenance marketplaces squeeze profit margins from service providers by selling them leads and creating artificial competition. Dobby only takes commissions when the job is completed.
"We don't pay for ads on Dobby. The chat-bot makes it super easy to communicate virtually and minimize the number of visits. And we get paid within 24 hours," said Zela from LMK Plumbing, a family-owned small business in Maryland. "This is game-changing."
Dobby has been enjoying double-digit monthly growth in the DC metro area. With this new funding, Dobby will continue expanding operations in this region and building the playbook for geographic expansion by mid 2021.
"I have seen incumbents and startups trying to solve the home maintenance problem, but I haven't seen the product-led vision that Dobby is executing on," said Ron Watson, a Partner at Dundee VC and Dobby board member. "The current market is a lead-generation business. Dobby is a value-creation business. From job specification to payment, Dobby automates home maintenance with a fully-digital AI-powered app."
About Dobby
Dobby unlocks the home maintenance marketplace with an AI-first, fully digital productivity platform for homeowners, and invite-only service providers community. Starting with home maintenance, Dobby is pioneering digitization & AI in the $16T residential property market. Dobby's vision is "to become the operating system for American homes" by creating customized experiences for modern homeowners.
